Commissioning of the magnetic field in the ATLAS muon spectrometer

ATLAS is a general-purpose detector at the 14 TeV proton-proton Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The muon spectrometer will operate in the magnetic field provided by a large, eight-coil barrel toroid magnet bracketed by two smaller toroidal end-caps. The toroidal field is non-uniform, with an average value of about 0.5 T in the barrel region, and is monitored using three-dimensional Hall sensors which must be accurate to ∼ 1 mT . The barrel coils were installed in the cavern from 2004 to 2006, and recently powered up to their nominal current. The Hall-sensor measurements are compared with calculations to validate the magnetic models, and used to reconstruct the position and shape of the coil windings. Field perturbations by the magnetic materials surrounding the muon spectrometer are found in reasonable agreement with finite-element magnetic-field simulations.